Handmaking faery style and pretty things

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Skirt to Pillowcase Top Refashion

This was a lovely skirt i got at a market somewhere in South America a few years ago. I absolutely love the spray-stencilled design on the front and the way the fabric is dyes and stitched diagonally, but the fabric was very lightweight and didn’t really work with tights, and i’m not someone who normally wears short skirts without tights! So this lovely skirt had languished in my wardrobe and only been worn a couple of times, until i came across it after reading numerous pillowcase top/dress tutorials from around the internet. Admittedly most of these were for little girls’ clothes, but i figured the principle was the same.

I didn’t follow any specific tutorial for this project, but if you want to look at some of my inspiration there are great tutorials and projects around like this one and this one for littler girls, and here, here and here for bigger girls! I just had the idea in my head from looking at lots of similar things the day before, and basically just winged it. As usual, i didn’t do a great job of taking pictures on the way, but i’m sure you can work it out!

The original skirt

The thing that made this super easy was that the skirt already had a drawstring waist, which meant that i didn’t even need to sew a ‘tube’ for my ribbon straps as it was already there for me.

I used a strappy top that fits to cut the armholes – i folded the skirt in half vertically, folded the top in half and laid it on top of the skirt with the folds together. I lined up the top edge of the top with the top edge of the skirt and used the scoop under the arm on the top cut away bits from the skirt to make arm holes. I then hemmed these edges (i turned in and hand-stitched the ends of what had been the drawstring tube to stop them fraying), and threaded some black ribbon through the front and back tubes to gather it into a pillowcase style top.

The holes where the original drawstring had emerged to tie the skirt looked a bit unsightly so i covered them with a bow of the same black ribbon.

Completed top

Sorry for the blurry photo – if you’re wondering why the top is back to front, i finished this in the middle of the night so ended up taking a photo myself in the mirror.

This was so easy i feel like a bit of a cheat posting it! I’d love to see any similar refashions anyone else has done :)